If you want to attend a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) program at your school of choice, you’ll have to take a Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT).
The GMAT is a test given to students that can gauge how well they’ll do in MBA programs. The score you get will influence the decision made about your admission by the school you’re eyeing.
The GMAT can help or hurt your chances at landing a spot in the program you want. That’s why many students use a GMAT Prep Course to supplement their study program.
Admission into a good business program can greatly impact your career prospects. If you get into a top business school, you can command a hefty salary upon graduation.
This article will focus on the best GMAT prep books to help you ace the GMAT exam.
GMAT Official Guide 2020 Bundle
This three-book set includes the Quantitative Review 2020, the Verbal Review 2020, and the GMAT Official Guide 2020 books. You’ll also get an online question bank and a mobile app.
These resources cover all the test sections and have more than 1,700 questions to help you prepare. If you get a test question wrong, it also has answer explanations so you can learn from your mistake.
This bundle of books is a good value for any student serious about preparing for the GMAT.
Make sure you have plenty of time on your hands, though, to use all these materials to fully prepare – it will be time intensive to go through this many pages.
All the GMAT
If you have a specific goal in mind of getting at least a 700 score on your GMAT, this three-book set can help you do it if you’re willing to put in the work.
This book provides content review, six online practice tests, and strategies you can use to boost your score.
The problems and lessons in this set were crafted by instructors who have landed 99th-percentile scores on the GMAT. This guide is for serious students – there are collectively 1,912 pages you’ll have to wade through.
GMAT Complete 2020
This set offers you four prep books, a year of access to online materials, and strategies to improve your test-taking skills. It includes more than 2,000 questions that cover integrated reasoning, analytical writing, quantitative, and verbal test sections.
You’ll also get six online practice tests. Because these practice tests use the exact computer interface as the real GMAT, you’ll be more prepared when test day rolls around.
The practice tests also let you choose the study topic and the question difficulty. This makes it easy to improve your skills with particular topics and question types.
This book set includes 2,268 pages collectively and is for serious students who want a top GMAT score.
GMAT Foundations of Math
If you think you are prepared for the GMAT, but you’re a little worried about the math section, this resource can give you more confidence.
It’s not aimed at teaching you all the math concepts you’ll need to understand to score well on the GMAT. Instead, it’s there to serve as a refresher course for the more basic concepts you’ll need to know.
So, this is a great option for people that need a math refresher. Once you get more comfortable with the basic material, you can move on to more advanced books.
The book will give you more than 700 practice problems and show you step-by-step instructions.
If you buy this book, you’ll also get one year of access to online resource materials, including more than 400 extra practice questions.
Cracking the GMAT
This 2020 edition book gives you six computer-adaptive practice tests with score reports and explanations to the answers. You’ll also get topic reviews, and online resource materials. It walks you through reviews of verbal, writing, math, and integrated reasoning skills.
You’ll also learn about test-taking techniques that can help you improve your score. It doesn’t stop with just readying you for your test though.
It includes other features to help you get into your business school of choice, such as sample business school essays and interviews. You’ll also learn about financial aid options.
It’s a good book for students who want to walk through the entire graduate school application process and can be useful to anyone from beginners to the more serious students.
GMAT Advanced Quant
This book is great for students who want to push themselves a bit further past the usual test prep work.
It’s geared toward those who want to land a score of 800 and aren’t afraid to put in the effort to make that happen. It focuses on the most trying math problems you’ll see on the GMAT.
Students will have access to more than 250 of these problems, as well as two online practice sets.
The GMAT Advanced Quant book is way too advanced for beginners, but this can be a great resource for students with strong math skills that want to achieve a top quartile math score.
30 Day GMAT Success
If you want to find a way to improve your GMAT score, but you only have a month to do so, this book may help.
The language and writing style make it accessible to beginners, and it teaches students to follow a study plan and how to address their strengths and weaknesses.
For students who like a more personal touch while reading a prep book, they may like that the author puts in advice that helped him the day he took the GMAT.
This book, however, will need to be supplemented with other GMAT books because you’ll want to make sure you have access to GMAT practice tests.
For some additional practice questions, we recommend trying our GMAT Practice Question of the Day resource.
